BY Pankaj Mishra
Last month Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. State Department’s special representative, met students from Pakistan’s north-west tribal areas. They were enraged by drone attacks, which — according to David Kilcullen, counter-insurgency adviser to General Petraeus — have eliminated only about 14 terrorist leaders while killing 700 civilians. One young man told Mr. Holbrooke that he knew someone killed in a Predator drone strike. “You killed 10 members of his family,” he said. Another claimed that the strikes had unleashed a fresh wave of refugees. “Are many of them Taliban?” Holbrooke asked. “We are all Taliban,” he replied.
Describing this scene in Time, Joe Klein said he was shocked by the declaration, though he recognised it as one “of solidarity, not affiliation.” He was also bewildered by the “mixed loyalties and deep resentments [that] make Pakistan so difficult to handle.” One wishes Klein had paused to wonder if people anywhere else would wholeheartedly support a foreign power that “collaterally” murders 50 relatives and friends from the air for every militant killed.
Much has been made of Pakistan’s “denial” about the threat posed by the Taliban rather than India; correspondingly, western politicians and commentators have applauded the Pakistani military operation in Swat valley that has exposed three million people to what Human Rights Watch calls a humanitarian catastrophe. Relatively little attention has been given to America’s more damaging evasion of the fact that most people in Pakistan, a “frontline” country in the war on terror, are unsympathetic, if not actively hostile, to it.
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